Pico + Feather memory allocation failed

[Marty Phee]

I'm working with a Pico and an AirLift FeatherWing

It's connecting to my Wifi and making a request to a service but I keep getting
MemoryError: memory allocation failed, allocating 9589 bytes

The server response is very small
{"data":"weather API running smoothly","status":"success"}

I've tried various ways of getting the response: text, json, iter_conect but always the same error

I add some gc memory dumps and it looks like it has enough. Not sure what to look at.

Alloc 35488
mem:  173536
Fetching status
200
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 36, in <module>
MemoryError: memory allocation failed, allocating 9589 bytes

Program

import board
import gc
import busio
from digitalio import DigitalInOut
import adafruit_requests as requests
import adafruit_esp32spi.adafruit_esp32spi_socket as socket
from adafruit_esp32spi import adafruit_esp32spi

WEATHER_STATUS_API = "my server"

esp32_cs = DigitalInOut(board.GP13)
esp32_ready = DigitalInOut(board.GP14)
esp32_reset = DigitalInOut(board.GP15)

spi = busio.SPI(board.GP10, board.GP11, board.GP12)

esp = adafruit_esp32spi.ESP_SPIcontrol(spi, esp32_cs, esp32_ready, esp32_reset)

requests.set_socket(socket, esp)

while not esp.is_connected:
    try:
        esp.connect_AP("...", "....")
    except RuntimeError as e:
        print("Unable to connect to wifi", e)
        time.sleep(2)
        
gc.collect()
print("Alloc", gc.mem_alloc())
print("mem: ", gc.mem_free())

print("Fetching status")
r = requests.get(WEATHER_STATUS_API)
print(r.status_code)
#print(str(r.content()))
print(b"".join(r.iter_content(chunk_size=32)))
# print("-" * 40)
r.close()